I had about 16 years of walking and 14 years of cycling around gradually increasingly complex environments before I drove a car.
The car controls are not the challenge. It’s understanding what everyone else is doing and how to handle it safely while making progress and not surprising other people that is tough. And those skills are partially - only partially - transferable from your pre-car experience.
>I had about 16 years of walking and 14 years of cycling
There are young kids that drive carts and race and they don't confuse walls and solid objects. The reason we don't allow younger people to drive is because young people are bad at managing risk(I done some very stupid risky things with my bike as a teen, I could have broke my bones or neck),
Autopilot from Tesla that uses mostly or only cameras has the issue of identifying obstacles which is a much generic problem(that young animals and kids have it solved) so you don't need to appeal to the "age of driving" excuse for this guys.
Not to mention, it's not just driving that makes you a good driver. It's 16 years of life experience. You spend that time growing up riding around in cars and busses. Living in the world, knowing how things work, learning how people behave. Driving is so much more than just pointing your wheel the way you want to go and pressing the gas and avoiding objects.
So many people don't even know all the rules of the road, but still manage to drive just fine without accidents. There are different unknown rules of the road in all different places around the world, but most people figure out how to adapt to them in a very short time.
> I had about 16 years of walking and 14 years of cycling around gradually increasingly complex environments before I drove a car.
A lot of that has to do with humans not being born with fully developed brains. Animals can walk and navigate environments as soon as they are born, so there is no reason to believe that humans actually learns these things rather than those systems slowly maturing as we grow up.
The other part is that our pre-trained movement system is made for human bodies, not cars. So learning to drive a car is learning to use another mode of moving yourself. Also you have to learn traffic rules. But the other things like understanding environments etc you get for free for being a human, every single large animal can do the same. They wont learn the traffic laws or how to drive the car, but they know how to navigate environments without hitting things.
I feel like driving a vehicle is fundamentally different from "natural" activities, because it involves a large difference in how you deal with things ahead versus the sides.
Things in front are highly compressed, while things to the sides are not, and your ability to move sideways is reduced by mass and speed.
When I was a teenager, I went on a road trip where I drove like 12 or more hours in a day, which I could never do now. At the end, I got home and for a while I had a weird sort of tunnel vision that I don't know how to describe. It was almost like I was looking through a fish-eye lens or something; everything seemed distorted because of spending so much time concentrating on small lateral motions and things coming towards me at highway speeds.
Sometimes I walk routes that I also frequently drive and it reminds me how motor vehicles compress time and space.
Birds can fly through thick forests without colliding with trees, and flying also is very clunky and you can't change your direction quickly etc. If they collide they die, so the selective pressure is really strong for them to not hit anything. Cheetahs can also run at highway speeds on uneven ground and still do just fine.
The car controls are not the challenge. It’s understanding what everyone else is doing and how to handle it safely while making progress and not surprising other people that is tough. And those skills are partially - only partially - transferable from your pre-car experience.